Home Sweet Home

The joke is wearing a bit thin - that I've escaped from the volatile Middle East to SAFETY in Northern Ireland...
Coleraine is a town near the coast, it's reached by a wide sweeping road with wide verges, a footpath and neatly trimmed hedges. The farmhouses en route are grey pebbled dashed with little sparkly mirrors in the pebble dash...
In Coleraine everybody talks to you - the security man in Dunnes Stores took five minutes to tell me there was no food court, the Fitting Room man in TK MAX was as thrilled as me when I found Vera Wang bras for a fiver, the woman in Laura Ashley explained with great charm their interior design service...
I popped into a shop - they sold sweets in glass jars- I bought a quarter of butterscotch tablets...
I'm thinking perhaps I escaped from the volatile Middle East and went back in time 60 years...

International Politics

I took Rex to the doctor this afternoon - he has a chill in his kidney. We were sent to the lab for Rex to give blood - the lab technician was an Asian gentleman from some where on the sub continent.
Making polite conversation he asks us: "Where are you from? UK?"
I say: "We are from Ireland."
Rex says: "Actually we're from Northern Ireland."
And the bloke says: "Madam, your son is a Unionist."
He knew all about N. Irish politics and I couldn't tell you what country he comes from.

Home Thoughts from Abroad

Sometimes I wish I could fly home for Christmas. To frosty skies and roaring log fires. A hamper from Fortnum and Mason. Carol singers sipping mulled wine. The Christmas Day rerun of National Velvet. Then I read something like Republican Rudolf on-line from my local newspaper and I remember why I don't live in Northern Ireland any more...

Modelling

Happiest day of my life... Anyway, Richard and Rosalind Mulholland have got up a website to advertise their lovely house Ballyscullion Park where Nick and I had our wedding reception. And Ros asked us if we'd like to model the wedding section...

Pam McBride

Of course you know this already - behind every great man is a far greater woman.... Last night we went to hear Willie John McBride give an after dinner talk at the rugby club. Mr McBride is a legend, he's also one of my neighbours in Ireland, our farms are five miles apart.
The queue for Willie John's autograph stretched half way across the marquee so I contented myself with Pam's autograph. I won't wash my arm for a week

Giant's Causeway

The Giant's Causeway is a popular tourist destination in Northern Ireland - the curious come in spite of the weather to climb the basalt columns and hear the story of Finn McCool. McCool was an Ulster giant who liked to throw insults across the sea to a Scottish giant called Benandonner - "I'll beat you up with one arm and one leg tied behind my back!" He even built the causeway so Benandonner could walk to Ulster to fight him. When Finn saw Benandonner coming he quickly erected a giant sized crib. He lay down inside the crib, and his wife covered him with a blanket. When Benandonner arrived for the fight and saw the size of the McCool 'infant' he said: "What size is the father, if this is the size of the child?"
Panicking he ran back to Scotland, tearing up the causeway as he went.

The Glorious Twelfth

It's years since I was in Northern Ireland for the Glorious Twelfth. I remember it as the most colourful part of my dull rural childhood for my father was Worshipful Master of a tiny Orange Lodge, and on the 12th July we were taken to watch him marching through the local village behind a raggle taggle accordian band. He wore his best dark suit, his shoes were polished and his hair was slicked back with Brylcreme. This was the early 70s and I was too young to understand the tribal connotations of the marching Orangemen - my favourite 'tune' was The Green Grassy Slopes of the Boyne.
Now I realise most Orangemen have never seen the Boyne river. The infamous battle between William of Orange and King James that is commemorated with band parades in Northern Ireland took place in what is now County Louth, in the Republic of Ireland and Orangemen rarely cross the border, even nowadays.
My father is one of the lucky few. I went to university in Dublin and for four years he had the job of driving me there, and driving me home, with my bicycle strapped to the roof of the car. There was no motorway and we always stopped for a picnic on the green grassy slopes of the Boyne.